


Canta

by cognomen



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Anal Sex, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, Semi-Public Sex, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-30
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-12 00:29:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4458380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Tristan is unwell," the report comes in confidence, delivered to Galahad by Lancelot who knows - with the accuracy and acclarity of any good seconds in command - where news is best delivered for maximum impact. It is a careful delegation. </i> </p><p>-</p><p>A belated birthday celebration for the 11th year since release. A combination of a few short works written for prompts, but these can easily be all interconnected so they'll all be together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1st Stanza

"Tristan is unwell," the report comes in confidence, delivered to Galahad by Lancelot who knows - with the accuracy and acclarity of any good seconds in command - where news is best delivered for maximum impact. It is a careful delegation.

"How unwell?" Galahad asks. It is not the first time he has been asked to take advantage of his rapport with Tristan to overcome the knight's stubborn refusal to take care of himself.

Lancelot tosses his head in the direction of Tristan's quarters, casual enough that Galahad knows it is not dire. "He has not fed the hawk, and she is raising her displeasure in the mews."

Serious, but not a wound. Galahad would have known sooner if Tristan had returned with a cut or a cleave. This was, like as not, too much exposure to cold and wet, too few nights with a roof or fire. Too much scouting for one single scout and yet it was both what they had and necessary that he endure it. For that sacrifice, the knights do not let him suffer alone.

"Thank you," he tells Lancelot. Galahad makes it a point not to hover, not to make his presence at Tristan's side so constant as to be obvious. He worries, of course, but Tristan requires a careful hand. He needs at least the illusion of independence, and Galahad minds the time he spends. Perhaps, for both of them, suffocation in the slow mire of affection is too much.

"Quiet the hawk and no thanks are necessary," Lancelot answers, wryly. The dark of sleep too soon interrupted is beneath his eyes. He does not admit that he and the other knights trade watches, each minding what few brothers they have left so that no one goes uncared for.

Galahad claims scraps from the kitchens - lean rabbit leavings and some parts of a chicken he would rather not identify - and braves the mews. Conseca does not like him, but they have advanced to tentative mutual respect. They must at times compete for Tristan's affections. Galahad usually wins, being the more persuasive with his charms. Conseca spends more time at Tristan's side. In the knight's eyes, this is equal. The hawk, clearly, does not see it this way.

Her voice is strident and shrill, a demanding hunger. Galahad is careful to enter the mews with his fistful of meat to the fore, to stave off her fierce and demanding beak and claws from his skin.

The mews are shadowed, and smell like dust and feathers, like old bird shit though the floors are swept. The scent has lived for so long in the walls it might linger long after the Wall itself and the mile fort fell. There are several other birds, hooded and complacent, but Conseca never wears one. Her eyes are an angry, green shine in the dim, her beak open to show the terror of her red and threatening mouth.

"Conseca," he tempts, soothing. She turns her head and refuses to leap to his fist, though her small, intent eye roves over his hand and the bloody scraps held out like a shield.

Her look, when it lifts to Galahad, holds accusation. He is not who she wants, hungry as she must be. Normally, Tristan would feed her first in the morning and then let her fly. Galahad, under her cold gaze, feels himself clearly too stupid and inferior to be welcome.

"Conseca," he tries again, holding the food in front of him. He is - a little - afraid of her. Once, he had seen her descend into combat from nowhere, a furious streak of brown feathers and then, flying blood. Since then, he is keenly aware of the vulnerability of his own eyes and her long, curved claws.

This time, she does not ply them on his skin. Instead, Galahad goes to her, careful and slow with his arm held all the way out, offering in his fingers like he might approach a god. The other birds shift a little, moving away, but she never wavers. Opening her wings and beak both, and making a threat of herself.

He lets her tear the meat out of his hand in vicious yanks, and is grateful that she seems to mind his skin while she sits perched.

With this, Galahad is patient, fascinated by how much she seems like Tristan when she looks just slightly less fierce.

"You're a good match," he tells her. She hisses at him, and when she's eaten all he brought she springs off the perch and flies free. It leaves him with bloody and slimy fingers. Galahad neither worries nor tries to stop her.

She'll return. She isn't like the others.

-

Inside, with clean hands and a steaming bowl of soup to offer Tristan, Galahad makes this offering in much the same way. In this, he is less hesitant. Even in his greatest ire or irritation, Tristan was unlikely to claw Galahad's eyes out. 

"Tristan," Galahad calls softly, looking out for the scatter of discarded gear on the floor. 

It's this, more than anything else that tells of exhaustion and sickness. Tristan is not careless with his gear, more aware of how often it kept him alive than most of their brother-knights. Galahad steps over and around, balancing the bowl in the darkness. Tristan is a still, deep breathing form on the bed, and Galahad settles next to him, letting his hand creep out toward his face.

"I'm awake," Tristan murmurs in the instant before Galahad's fingers touch his hot cheek. It startles him - just faintly, enough that several drops of hot soup escape into Galahad's lap and he sucks air through his teeth.

"Your mistress was irate," Galahad tells him, and it earns a low chuckle. Tristan shifts, a stiff motion.

"Did she take it out on you?"

Galahad makes an affirmative noise, finding that Tristan is hot to the touch, that his hair is lank with sweat and his scalp is damp with it. The fever concerns him.

"Can you eat some?" Galahad asks.

Tristan's eyes are glassy and distant. He shakes his head, but offers no explanation. He is at the best a terrible patient, and at the worst unwilling to seek or accept help.

Galahad stands and trades the bowl for cool water from the pitcher and a rag. Some he presses - and pours - against Tristan's mouth until he drinks, rather than to give him a chance at refusal. Some he soaks into the rag and soothes over skin until Tristan shivers.

"Too much," he says.

Galahad leans down and presses his mouth to Tristan's forehead, telling him to sleep. Tristan seems compelled to obey or unable to resist - either way he allows the sleep that he so badly needs, and Galahad is free to tidy his quarters.

-

The wonder and comfort of green spaces are lost to Galahad. As a child, he had found them to be safe - tall trees to shelter him from the sun in dappled and tinted shade. Then, the magic of the forest had seemed his, and now it was turned against him and his brothers. He has become its enemy somehow, and now there is no shelter or safety in low boughs or spread leaves.

Conseca has no such reserve, and it leaves Galahad exposed at the edge of the wood, trying to emulate Tristan's high whistle to summon her. He has two fat, dead chicks poached from the coop in his fist - though she can certainly hunt for herself. Some part of Galahad is compelled to be certain she is fed, hale, whole. As if - and it was easier to believe this than in Arthur's God - the health of both were tied together.

While Conseca is healthy, Tristan cannot perish. While Tristan lived, she would fly on. They were, to Galahad's mind, inseparable in that tangible way. 

That's why, when after three days Tristan's fever keeps him muttering and shivering, refusing anything but water for the roiling in his belly, Galahad stands here instead.

"Come and eat," he calls into the dim and foreboding trees, and hopes the invitation does not go to any but who he intends it for. "Come and keep your strength."

No one questioned his determined march out from the gate into the dangerous place beyond. He does not _know_ Conseca is here, but he senses her, like he does when Tristan's eyes are on him from someplace unseen. A weight of want and wildness on Galahad's shoulders.

He sees no sign of her in the trees, and waits with his bloody offering until the cold numbs his ears and fingers and he can face the heat and small space of Tristan's quarters again, until that seems better than the cold.

When he turns back at the gate, he can see her small brown shape where he has left the bodies in the field, and supposes she at least has not found the offering distasteful, even if she found the offerer to be.

-

The illness is slow to fade, ravaging Tristan to thinness, agonizing Galahad until neither of them are any good for work, until it takes Arthur himself to drive Galahad from the bedside to get his own rest and the other knights are forcing broth and small meals on the both of them.

In the moments when he can pull himself away, Galahad goes to the edge of the woods and makes offerings to Conseca in bloody leavings and small glimpses. Whenever he sees her, flying and strong, he feels better able to return to Tristan's side to face whatever it is that keeps him pinned and sweating, for more than a sevenday.

When at last the illness unwinds its sharp talons from Tristan, Galahad wakes at an empty bedside and feels only relief. All is as it should be, if Tristan is wandering. Even if he does not yet feel complete, the journey has begun.

Without bothering to dress, Galahad pulls a blanket over his shoulders and braves the chill with more trepidation than he has ever weathered battle. It would be the sort of irony this northern world delighted in for him to next fall ill.

"When you stand in front of it," he says, finding Tristan at the edge of the woods that have so warned Galahad off. "It seems foreboding."

Tristan rolls his dark eyes slowly, warmly in Galahad's direction. He looks bedraggled even to eyes that find his ragged looks familiar, but he would not dream of seeing to his comfort over the hawk's. 

"Only what you don't know is intimidating," Tristan tells Galahad. "You know I know these woods."

"And I never mind facing them with you at my side," Galahad tells him.

Tristan does not remark. He is - and will be - fine again. He whistles, sharp and high, and an answering shriek comes from the dark line of trees, the ascending keen of a hawk before Conseca appears, ever ready to answer _his_ beckon.

_How does she know Tristan's particular whistle?_ Galahad has done his best to emulate pitch and tone, and always carried food. She has never shown himself until he turns to go. This time, she appears as if conjured from thin air and the understanding between her and Tristan.

But she doesn't go to Tristan. Instead, Galahad realizes almost too late that her path is straight and true - and he frees his arm from the blanket in the instant before she alights on it, her grip tight but not painful, careful on his wrist. 

For a moment, he does not know what to do. Conseca is lighter than he expects, and feels like a wound rope, like running his fingers over the tightened sinews of a drawn crossbow. 

Galahad moves slowly until she can reach the meat in Tristan's fist, and she lunges hungrily for it but does not give up her perch.

He dares a sheepish glance up at Tristan, finding he looks more amused than upset.

"You've made friends," Tristan observes.

"She's only upset that you did not come for so long," Galahad says. Tristan dares to stroke the feathers beneath Conseca's chin and she utters an annoyed trill of displeasure, earning a chuckle from Tristan. 

"She's making a point of solidarity," Tristan suggests instead. "Her belly has been appeased but not her demands."

Galahad holds very still, a little in awe of earning her favor, even if it was only to make a point to Tristan. "I brought her food every day."

"She won't forget," Tristan assures him. "You brought me food every day as well."

"Getting the pair of you to eat requires a similar amount of time and persistence," Galahad mutters, and too it earns him a similar expression on both sets of features. 

"Be lucky I did not get so concerned I spooned broth into her beak and shoved dead mice into your mouth," Galahad tells them both.

Tristan's hand makes an affectionate pass through Galahad's hair - he uses the one he had not carried raw meat in - and Galahad endures the discouraging slaps of Conseca's strong wings to lean over her head and press his mouth to Tristan's, knowing they are both grateful.

[End.]


	2. 2nd Stanza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is something about the cold that brings the dreams. Tristan can sense them oncoming, a charge in the air around Galahad like the moment of stillness before a storm. A hesitation in the ease that usually surrounded Galahad's sleeping form.
> 
> In the dark, the low light of the campfire that their small party of knights are curled next to, Tristan can see how the change creeps over Galahad's features - usually soft and sweet in sleep. Eased. Still youthful in a way Tristan has not felt in years.

There is something about the cold that brings the dreams. Tristan can sense them oncoming, a charge in the air around Galahad like the moment of stillness before a storm. A hesitation in the ease that usually surrounded Galahad's sleeping form.

In the dark, the low light of the campfire that their small party of knights are curled next to, Tristan can see how the change creeps over Galahad's features - usually soft and sweet in sleep. Eased. Still youthful in a way Tristan has not felt in years.

He does not sleep much. He draws restoration from safety, feels rested to watch Galahad rest untroubled and with a clear brow. In the cold, that fades and changes, and no matter how strongly the impulse takes him to chafe warmth into Galahad's fingers, to lay his warm palms over cold cheeks until the dreams and chill both ease their touches back from his body, it isn't his place out here. Galahad has certain allowances that he will either make or not - Tristan has begun to learn them.

He watches instead, cold himself and curled quiescent into a blanket for comfort and without the threat of sleep. Galahad's visage hesitates on the edge of concern until his dreaming mind turns toward terror. It is slow to creep in - Tristan thinks it is only this way the dreams can overcome Galahad's natural valor.

They must creep in at the edges, unperceived until the strike is real as Tristan does to his own foes.

Galahad twists in the blankets, fighting an invisible knight, voice soft to breathlessness as it pours out of him in small moans. Tristan's fingers gather tight in his own blanket, as aware of each of these sounds as branches breaking in the woods, of bird silence or following footfalls. It aches through him a little - he wants to ease the passage of the dream past Galahad's mind as he does his own trespass in the forest. To leave the landscape behind somehow unchanged. Rested. Pristine.

He can't, no more than he could stop a forest fire. Just watch it blaze to life and then set, rising until Galahad springs awake, eyes showing wide whites like a frightened horse, sucking air in a hiss that threatens far more sound and yet quiets when darkness and cold firelight greet him.

Tristan waits, as he always waits, until Galahad decides to seek company on his own. He lifts one edge of his blanket in offering, and beneath it, sharing heat, Galahad is solemn and shivering. They can lean together while sensation returns to Galahad's extremities.

-

They are alone against the darkness when the boots no longer survive, two years past when replacements should have arrived from Rome. Somewhere in the paperwork or long journey they have been waylaid and the knights - as ever - make do. Galahad's boots are patched and sewn, the leather trying to pull and part at every stitch. 

The snow, mud beneath, freezing and sucking hungrily, proves too much for these at last. The sole tears free of Galahad's left boot, and they waste half an hour in Woad territory with their hands plunged into frigid slush in search of it.

It has vanished into the snow. Dust to dust.

They abandon the hope of finding it and Galahad trudges on in misery while Tristan tries to find the quickest and driest path to shelter. Galahad stumbles into the tent already clawing for the ragged laces, as if he is burned rather than cold. His skin is pale and his fingers are clumsy and desperate with fear. 

Tristan slows him, peeling the thin leather away gently, with careful attention. He has little doubt that it's painful, that it feels frozen to the core, but Galahad's toes have not yet gone black in the soaked and half frozen sock. Their sighs intermingle, relieved. 

"How will I get home?" Galahad asks, admitting a single, tired weakness as Tristan chafes cold flesh gently between his warm palms, then the dry blanket. Tristan is bent to the task and the question should be simple, easy. They will repair Galahad's boot with some 'spare' piece of leather - cut from their packs if they must, or Tristan will carry him from the wild and back to the wall - but Galahad uses 'home' to mean a place beyond that. 

Over the mountains, that was home, as in the song. It called his brothers and fellows back, a promise of something that Tristan did not remember. He thought of it as a collective madness, a goal that so few of them would live to see that whatever reality was in it, in the Sarmatia of their gathered dreams, could not matter for him.

Tristan would face what he had so that others could return. His peace is in this, in long days in the snow and lonesome patrols. And such moments as this.

"If any one of us returns home," Tristan tells Galahad, warming his toes to pink between his own cold fingers, "it will be you."

"The smallest, the youngest," Galahad sniffles irritably - his nose too has begun to thaw in the warming confines of the tent. "I don't want to live because everyone else has made sacrifices for me."

"The fiercest," Tristan corrects him, unable to stop the upward curve of his mouth. "The fastest."

He would survive out of sacrifice, he would survive because he was loved. He laughs when Galahad wraps a fist into his hair and yanks Tristan nearly into his lap, angrily pulling their mouths together and sparking up new heat between them, now that the terror of such dire risk is past.

"You will get home," Tristan says into the bare skin of Galahad's palm when he pushes it over his lips to still laughter, to shove Tristan flat and swing one leg over his hips with a stern expression that is stormy and beautiful, his eyes threatening to make a shipwreck of Tristan's heart and all he wants is to sail the roaring sea.

"In new boots or old, horseback or crawling," he assures, against muffling skin while Galahad yanks the laces of his pants open. "You will get home."

-

Tristan does not remember the night they had discovered wine as a very young company - when the anesthetic properties of ale had finally overcome the bitterness of beer on the tongue. Better, he remembers the morning after which they had all suffered through.

He woke hot, sweltering under blankets shared with another body, and found Galahad when he pulled them back. Any of the other knights would have appointed themselves Galahad's protector, save Tristan.

Perhaps that is why, still, when Galahad is (feels, _needs_ to be) vulnerable, he does it softly and angrily in Tristan's embrace. Tristan has been appointed because he has never seen fit to try and appoint himself.

On that morning the bond of bad habits began. Unspoken and without conscious decision. When the terror of what they faced, a cold and slow fire not unlike what Tristan's imagined Arthurs' God reserving for all non-believers, caught them. They would catch themselves up instead. It meant many sore heads and uncertain riders until they learned their limits. 

Tristan has learned to navigate the passages of his intoxication like the deer tracks and hunters’ paths that stretch through the wild. Galahad's method is simpler: crash through. He punishes himself with drink as much as he relieves himself with it, running at it headlong until he empties his stomach and mind in the same heaving, white moments.

Then he finds Tristan.

To truly be a good protector, Tristan thinks, an honest keeper must sometimes let the danger pass and only then be there. He cannot rescue Galahad from the source of these episodes - cannot undo time and place and reverse that he had been barely a man when he spilled his first blood, when his blood had first been spilled in earnest. He should still have been skipping stones, learning hearth-side and working the gentle labors of their youth. In danger of skinned knees and insect stings only.

But, rosy cheeked and sweet-faced, he swung a sword instead. Tristan protects him only from the results - the helpless rages, the fear, the desire to be well away and home.

While there is no _over the mountains_ they can reach, Tristan allows him beneath his blankets and endures the heat of his suffering with his cool calm and the gentle easing of his palms over hot skin.

It is not entirely unselfish. 

-

This has become the ritual on the day they bury a brother - if they have enough to bury.

Knights standing a shrinking semicircle around the toothy hole, wide and never quite square.  
Arthur speaks his eulogy. He has never given a bad one. Even disliked men fought against the Woads and are remembered only for their good traits, when they are dead.

Galahad wonders what his own eulogy will sound like.

He drowns out the vivid sound of Arthur's imagined droning with ale or wine or whiskey or all three. His fingers get tighter on his mug as they begin to grow fuzzy and foreign to his awareness.

When he stumbles away from the table, his ears are ringing and his steps unsure but he knows where he is going. It is the same path every time - latrine, and then a slow trek through wan moonlight past his own door. tonight, he can still hear Arthur's prayer in his ears, and the dark lazy spots in his vision drift as aimlessly as flotsam, as permanent as handfuls of dirt. He does not, at least, have to empty his stomach. It may yet change.

Tristan won't mind his sins, the uncleanliness of his mourning. Mordred is forever beneath the earth and silent, and Arthur can only mourn in Godly virtue and aged Latin - with prayer and morose evaluation of his own purpose in life. Galahad's methods are as filthy as the very dirt to which the body was consigned, but effective.

He does not knock, Tristan will know who trespasses. He is already in the small confines, reclined on his bed with his plate and cup to hand, with the stone and dagger working against each other in gasping whispers of steel. It is as close to sobs as Galahad ever catches him, this sound of impossible readiness. 

Neither says anything. Galahad takes the knife out of Tristan's hands and puts it aside with only enough care to be certain it will not be stepped on in the morning. He takes the whet stone as well and simply tosses it, letting it impact the swept dirt floor with a dull sound that's nearly lost to his ears beneath the steady beat of his own blood.

He sinks his hands into Tristan's hair and grips tight, yanking their mouths together. Galahad's is not the only tongue to taste of wine, though Tristan draws back with a hiss at how strong and red the flavor must be on Galahad's breath.

Galahad bites Tristan's lower lip to stay his retreat, and for a moment the resistances between them, the harshness in their handholds are real. 

It doesn't quite soften, simply begins to flow rather than locking strength against strength. It keeps them from finding a frustrating impasse even as Galahad sinks his teeth into Tristan's shoulder, feeling how clumsy and slow intoxication makes him as he tugs at the buckles, ties, and catches that keep Tristan clothed and armored against him.

He takes his frustration out on Tristan's skin with his teeth, with the firm hooks of his fingers until Tristan sits up and shifts, shedding himself of Galahad and the clothing in one motion, as a dog would shake water from its coat.

"You're fierce tonight," Tristan observes, reaching to pin Galahad and strip his clothes as well.

Galahad does not argue, his skin is hot and his clothes feel tight at his neck and hips and he twists from them even as they try to constrict tighter around him. When his arms are free, he wraps them around Tristan's neck, when his boots and breeks are pulled off, he tucks his ankles at the small of Tristan's back.

"I am always fierce," he snarls, and Tristan laughs in a low sound pressed skin to skin and transmitted as much by contact as heard. Galahad grips at Tristan's shoulders and feels the skin soft and sliding over the blades of bone beneath, alive and dark with sun and pliant.

"Are you showing Death what she'd be coming for?" Tristan asks, reaching down to curl tamed and rough fingers around Galahad's hardening pink cock, the sensation dim but beautiful in the muffled alcohol tunnel his mind has retreated into. It is a slow, pleasurable spin distant of the sensation and yet warm. Galahad, now satisfied, surrenders down into the comfort of rushing breath and the warmth of skin and shared space. This is a warm glow in the frigid desert in his mind. 

"Showing Death what," he gasps, pausing when Tristan suffers the raking of Galahad's nails on his shoulders to close his mouth on Galahad's hardening cock and letting it fill his mouth, under the sweet encouragement of Tristan's tongue. "She has left behind."

There is no answer to suit but the one Tristan gives him; physical and visceral, hot and covering his mind in passionate heat like a blanket. Between sensation and the spiral caused; between the sharpness of pleasure and the dimness of drink, Galahad loses his capacity to mourn. He frequently leaves it here, shedding it like a heavy coat of maille between these other emotions.

Galahad curls his fingers into Tristan's hair and arches up, sighing, gasping. He chases his release, pursues it relentlessly even when Tristan tries to slow down, to draw it out.

He shoves Tristan over instead with rough hands when the pace no longer satisfies him. He thinks about taking the most of his advantage, of stretching Tristan open and being the one fucking him for once - Tristan will not protest. But, it will not bring the white bliss of endurance. 

Galahad hunts and finds the slick, while Tristan lays back obediently, his fist a loose curl around his own dark cock and languidly stroking.

Galahad pours generously through Tristan's fingers until he's running wet, dripping, before he turns his attention on himself, slapping Tristan's slick fingers away and discarding the slow patience with which he's circling. Not pressing in. 

Galahad plunges two fingers deep and the sting is bright in his mind. _Sharp._ Pleasurable. 

Tristan's hands move over Galahad's thighs, patient. It is a connection between them, pulling Galahad down even as his mind drifts away, elevates when he stretches himself wide over Tristan's guided cock and the sought-after blankness in his mind. It's full and heavy and good, and he rides it out with his teeth bared and his eyes closed, pushing and refusing to be slowed. 

"I wonder how often you want me," Tristan murmurs, voice drifting, "and how often you want me out of the way."

Galahad does not want to think, not with Tristan's cock hammering a bright nail of pleasure deep inside him and all his concentration on keeping the angle just so, the pressure just _so_.

"Just," Galahad manages, " _this_ way."

Tristan's grip gets tighter, warning, and Galahad's voice turns wordless, warning in return.

"Don't dare-"

"Then slow-"

Galahad doesn't slow. Tristan can't hold off - he curls his fist tight on Galahad's cock and tries to rush him along. They do not match each other, the results imperfect but effective.

Together, quick breathing. Sweat.

"I always want you," Galahad tells him. "That's why I always come here."

Tristan makes a tired sound, a blissful one. "You could say my name once in a while."

The request surprises Galahad. "I haven't...?"

"In the midst of ordering me onto my back," Tristan continues. "I'd like it."

-

The apple trees bloom early in the spring, delicate pink and white flowers that promise a wealth enough of apples for a good year. For cider and pies, and to suit Tristan's ravening appetite for them. The orchard, in the tame rows of bee-tended green, offer a small sanctuary. Galahad finds himself anxious for the first warm days of spring, watching the tiny leaves unfurl and the buds form.

The knights and Woads both feel the length and chill of the winter, the casualties from either side rotted and gone under the snow or buried if they could be recovered. The earliest part of spring is the quietest in an uneasy, unarranged truce before violence sprang up from the ground with the blooming daisies again.

Galahad carries the food and the blanket out into the field of blooming apple trees, a determined trek out on the first day of the year warm enough for it. Tristan will find him - he always does. 

The scent of sweet blooms wakes old memories, and Galahad lays the blanket out on the new grass as he had since they were small. The discovery of the orchard - smaller, then, and younger as the knights themselves had been - had seemed a sanctuary, wondrous and beautiful. These trees, unlike the tall, black and snow-covered pines, were welcoming. They had climbed into the sheltering boughs in spring and fall for quiet dreams and red, ripe apples.

Galahad makes the same promise he has to the trees since he was small enough for it to be a true conviction - he would see them again in the fall, when the blossoms became apples. He would survive the trials of the summer and promise them again, then, to see when they bloomed. A habit from a more innocent time.

He lays back on the blanket, and looks up at the new green leaves against the cloud-adorned sky, the fresh blues and greens of living things. 

"Every year I think, _this will be the year I beat Galahad_ ," Tristan's voice comes into his drifting awareness, but Galahad doesn't look around. He is aware of Tristan laying out another blanket, and when the other knight settles down next to him, Galahad reaches out. Their hands find each other with familiar ease, Galahad's finger interlacing between Tristan's dirty ones. 

"Beat me to what?" Galahad asks, a calm feeling - a right one - suffusing him.

"To this. Someday you'll get here and find I've laid out the blanket first."

Galahad brushes his thumb over the side of Tristan's palm, in a smear of mud that slides dark between their touches. "What does it matter who comes first? It doesn't begin until we're both here."

Overhead, clouds crawl by, the breeze stirs in the leaves and wakes the trees to lazy, springing motions. For a few moments, peace lives there and memories of youth, of discoveries made in these moment when the air was easy to breathe and scented with apple blossoms rather than the red metallic tang of blood and cold. The first time they had kissed, when sober and seeing straight - Galahad counts the others as real but separate - had been here, with the sunset painting the sky a pale pink to match the blossoms. 

There were other firsts there, too. The atmosphere was easy for them. Galahad just waits, and Tristan indulges in patience with him, until the silence turns hungry. Galahad folds his hands over his chest. The clouds drift - shaping galloping horses, leaping cats - and then in a moment that brings a smile to Galahad's face as the tension ratchets up, a phallus in crude lines.

Tristan hoists himself over Galahad's chest, eyes intense and patience gone. They will have five more such springs, five more years before they are free to go away on their own at last. That feeling is a strange one, for Galahad. He tries to set these thoughts aside. 

"You're heavy," Galahad tells Tristan.

"Good," Tristan says. "You won't forget I'm here."

Galahad chuckles. As if he could. He feels a smile spreading slow and lazy over his features as he pulls his eyes from the sky at last and looks instead into Tristan's hungry gaze.

"Tristan," Galahad tempts, "do you want to be on top for once?" 

He scratches his nails audibly down the back of Tristan's armor, earning a sharp, predatory look. 

"For once?"

Galahad hooks his fingers into the long hair at the back of Tristan's head and pulls, hard, until Tristan's neck is bared to him.

"For once," he says against the soft skin, before closing his teeth on it and sucking a mark.

Tristan makes a wordless noise, suspicious of Galahad's seeming generosity, of the unusual offer to negotiate position when usually Galahad simply shoved Tristan into whatever tractability he desired and took what he intended.

"I don't see-" Tristan begins, and then stops, distracted with Galahad's mouth on his throat.

"You will," Galahad promises him as he reaches out the pul the other blanket over them, to give them some privacy as they strip each other.

Galahad does not remind Tristan before they reach the point of penetration what he is usually doing on top. Tristan does not complain.

-

They cannot steal much time, as ever. Even in the uneasy truce of early spring, a long absence is noted - if not by Arthur, then by others.

In this case, their stolen moments of warm, entangled sleep - naked but for the blankets - are interrupted by the vast wave of Bors' children overrunning the orchard like a herd of wild horses, shrieking and chasing each other.

None are scandalized to find they have interrupted the very sleepy and satisfied pair of knights. They are as used to - and as unashamed of - interrupting trysts as Galahad has become of _being_ interrupted. 

At least this time they had the decency to wait until they were finished. Galahad claims the top blanket to keep himself decent and leaves Tristan to make the best of the grassy and soiled bottom blanket. He wraps it hastily around his hips and tucks the end in as the wave of youngsters wash over their camp, claiming all edible remains of their picnic. 

"How come you guys spend so much time in the orchard?" One of the boys - _Quintus_ , Galahad thinks - asks. 

"Why do _you_?" Galahad returns the question, saving his pants from jam-sticky fingers trying to capture them, and recovering his shirt next.

"We're pretending to be knights!" a girl boasts, brandishing a stick instead of a sword. 

Galahad feels his expression soften, and a cool breeze wafts through the material of the blanket soothingly over the bare skin beneath. "We come to pretend we're children again."

This earns him the confused expression he expects, and then laughter as the children decide he has made a joke at their expense. The children envy them their valors and honors, all imagined in play, and the knights wish - for a few moments at least - for the freedoms of childhood.

-

[End.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a series of prompts by Quedarius (http://archiveofourown.org/users/Quedarius/pseuds/Quedarius), who also beta-read this chapter. :)


	3. 3rd Stanza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Taking care of someone," Galahad coughs, leaning forward to expel hot, bitter tea from his lungs and airways after Tristan had forced it past his teeth, "implies _care_."

"Taking care of someone," Galahad coughs, leaning forward to expel hot, bitter tea from his lungs and airways after Tristan had forced it past his teeth, "implies _care_."

Tristan does not look sorry. Instead, his eyes are bright and fierce and attentive. There is no question that, as he recovers, Galahad will be _attended_ carefully, with no change unseen and no ailment dismissed. The methods are firm and insistent.

Galahad cannot bargain his way out of mint and ginger tea, cannot avoid doses of honey for his sore throat or various other remedies, ranging from matronly to disgusting.

"I care," Tristan informs Galahad. 

Tristan's care is of a sort Galahad is curious about surviving. It may be more challenge than the ailment. He does not argue - he has learned there are no merits in it.

"Open your mouth," Tristan instructs, authoritative and intense, offering between his thumb and forefinger a bundle of rolled herbs that reek of anise and green cut grass.

Galahad balks. "Wasn't the tea enough?"

The fingers come closer to his mouth, Tristan's expression unchanging and intent. He expects Galahad's mouth to open until his finger push the first licorice kiss of herbs against Galahad's un-parting lips. There, he hesitates, waiting for Galahad's mind to change before he withdraws.

"I am not a hawk-"Galahad begins. Too soon. Tristan pushes the bundle between Galahad's parted teeth and onto the back of his tongue with no fear for his fingers. It sits there as bitter as the smell had promised and Galahad manages to grind the mossy-tasting ball once between his teeth before he swallows in self defense. Once. Twice. The taste lingers. 

Galahad resolves, as it slides catching down his throat, to never be sick again.

Tristan is used to nursing birds, and knowing better than his patient. That he makes approving sounds and rubs Galahad's back as he chokes down remedies that hit his stomach like stones is only the most distant of comforts.

"May _every god_ help you," Galahad growls, coughing and pushing the gentle hands away, "when next you get sick."

Galahad will not forget. He is well enough - through Tristan's ministrations or despite them - to remember this as a grudge, even when Tristan is chuckling a warm and sweet sound and letting Galahad rest in his lap. Galahad _will not_ forget.

[End.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -And this last, slightly more silly one for another friend looking for the reverse of 'Galahad taking care of Tristan'... which of course implies that Tristan is good at taking care of anything other than sick hawks. 
> 
> -Thanks for joining me for a quick little birthday bash for King Arthur, I had a lot of fun with these.

**Author's Note:**

> -1st Stanza for a combination of prompts: Galahad takes care of Tristan while he's sick and Galahad caring for/forming a better alliance with Chopper/Conseca  
> -Conseca literally means 'to chop' in latin.  
> -Tristan probably loves all the extra attention though let's be real he played up how sick he was just to have that sexy nurse Galahad.


End file.
